Logicalis US IDs Six Ways Flash is Changing the Storage Landscape

NEW YORK, July 22, 2014 – In situations where the fastest possible access to data is required – trading floors, for example – CIOs have traditionally turned to flash-based storage systems. No one disputes the performance advantages of flash over traditional disk or tape storage methods, but cost has always been a barrier to a wider adoption. Today, however, the flash technology that once made sense only when extreme high performance was required is now priced to attract the attention of CIOs from a wide range of mid-sized to large companies. To help CIOs determine if flash might be the right solution for their companies, Logicalis US, an international IT solutions and managed services provider (www.us.logicalis.com), has created a free, downloadable white paper, “Changing the Speed of Business,” and has outlined six key reasons flash storage makes sense for fast access to mission-critical data in mainstream applications.

“The storage market is going through a paradigm shift,” says Samad Ali, Vice President and General Manager, HP Solutions, Logicalis US. “At the June 2014 Discover conference, for example, one of our customers was briefed on the new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 solid-state disk array. He had been considering purchasing disk-based storage from HP, but the value proposition of the HP 7450 array was so compelling that he changed his mind on the spot, moving forward with an all solid state array for his general-purpose applications. The HP 7450 all-flash array offers 99.9999 percent availability and carries a five-year warranty all at a price point near that of disk-based storage.”

Six Ways Flash is Changing the Storage Landscape

When compared to traditional disk storage, flash offers faster access to information, faster applications, and more transactions per second, all of which provides business value in many forms: improved customer service, increased employee productivity, increased revenues, and improved brand image. Here are six reasons today’s flash-based storage deserves a thorough look.

Boosting Performance: Purpose-built flash storage systems can deliver performance boosts in application response times, accelerated access to infor­mation, and increased power efficiency when compared to conventional spinning disks. And, because flash storage is powerful enough to support an organization’s most demanding virtualized cloud environments, along with online transaction processing (OLTP), client virtualization, and business analytic applications, it is garnering attention from performance-hungry CIOs looking for new ways to speed access to business information.

Reducing Strain on Your Infrastructure: From an IT perspective, moving a large processing workload to a flash-based system allows the remainder of the IT infrastructure to breathe again. Shifting the most significant I/O load to a small flash storage appliance allows the massive disk sub-systems to handle the remaining workload far more efficiently. Deployed in solid state drives (SSDs), flash storage systems can help businesses shrink their IT infrastructures; as few as 10 SSDs in some situations can deliver storage performance equivalent to several hundred hard disk drives (HDDs) reducing storage footprint, power consumption, and cooling needs. With no read/write heads to move around on an SSD, physical wear is no longer an issue, so delays caused by spinning disks and moving heads are eliminated.

Eliminating I/O Bottlenecks: Eliminating I/O bottlenecks helps an infrastructure to run without much intervention by the IT staff, which means the time IT team members once devoted to making key applications run better on traditional storage no longer needs to be spent in that manner. When providing applications in the cloud, eliminating I/O bottlenecks means a faster and more consistent user experience with no latency, making flash a superior choice when applications are offered in the cloud. Companies that use SAP to run their entire organizations are another great example of what can happen when flash storage is used to eliminate I/O bottlenecks; every ERP function that SAP performs, and everything that’s tied to SAP such as Oracle databases, runs significantly faster with flash-based storage.

Eradicating Costly Workarounds: Because traditional spinning drives are relatively slow compared to processors and networks, over the years, the industry has come up with techniques to overcome that limitation. In a workaround known as “short stroking,” only a fraction of a storage system’s spinning drives are actually used to hold data while the rest sit idle. As a result, the heads don’t have to move very far to access the data, and the underutilized drives operate more efficiently, all of which improves performance. Perhaps not surprisingly, short stroking comes with a steep cost premium, because more capacity is purchased than is actually ever used, and flash-based storage eliminates the need for short stroking altogether, improving ROI for customers previously using this workaround dramatically.

Getting You Better Bang for Your IT Buck: Over the past five years, a continued price decline in solid state storage (SSS) and solid state drives (SSDs) was accompanied by an increase in capacity making flash storage suitable for an array of business applications. It’s important to note that price-per-IOPS (input/output operations per second) may be a better metric to use than price-per-gbyte when comparing flash to hard disk drives. Based on business’ need for speed, in the not-too-distant future, as flash storage continues to evolve, experts expect IT infrastructures will be built completely around flash: In what some have referred to as a “flash or trash” strategy to drive down further cost, mission-critical high-performance data will reside on flash-based systems, while everything else goes to serial ATA (SATA) drives.

Building Competitive Advantage: Data center transformation is being driven in part by the new ways companies are using their data. This trend coincides with the further emergence of big data, along with improved analytics capabilities that allow companies to extract value from data sets that had not previously been “mineable” for that information. Flash-based storage systems can accelerate the analytical process, allowing companies to extract that information more quickly than ever before. Gaining access to information sooner makes the information far more valuable, and deploying new analytics tools such as these can give companies a competitive advantage.

Logicalis is an international IT solutions and managed services provider with a breadth of knowledge and expertise in communications and collaboration, data center and cloud services, and managed services.

The Logicalis Group has annualized revenues of $1.6 billion, from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America and Asia Pacific, and is fast establishing itself as one of the leading IT and Communications solution integrators specializing in the areas of advanced technologies and services.

The Logicalis Group is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg and London AIM Stock Exchanges, with revenues of over $5 billion.